Life's A Beach And Then You Die

Rating: 8/10 (24 March 2008)

When this film was released some 18 years after the events it depicted it's reasonable to assume it would have interested and/or 'spoken' to mostly the survivors and families of the participants, i.e. servicemen/women directly involved, civilians - government personnel, clerks, typists etc - indirectly involved and, as stated, their immediate families. Viewed in 2008 for the first time, courtesy of TV, it's equally reasonable to assume that the majority of the above are no longer with us and/or around 90 years old which means that the film or rather TV)is now targeting a younger audience, one on whom it can't hope to have the same impact. It is, of course, virtually impossible to chronicle accurately everything that occurred on that momentous day but on the whole Cornelius Ryan, who adapted his own book for the screen, has probably done as well as anyone. Because I'm somewhat familiar with the subject via novels like Nevil Shute's Requiem For A Wren I missed the 'feel' of the build-up to the day which Shute captures so well in a novel in which D-Day itself is only peripheral, inasmuch as we enter the action more or less on June 5th but I realise that other viewers will not necessarily share this opinion. Rather bizarrely the necessarily large canvas negates the feeling of a collective effort and there's a danger that some viewers will empathise with one or a group of characters who never appear again. As a great admirer of French films/actors I was delighted to glimpse such luminaries as Arletty, Madeleine Renaud, Bourvil etc even in blink-and-you'll-miss-them cameos and I'm sure that Hollywood/UK buffs will feel the same about the likes of Eddie O'Brien, Rod Steiger, Harry Fowler, etc. On the whole I doubt if it could have been done better as an overall picture of a vital moment in wartime.